TITLE: Djinn's Chaos
NAME: Stefan Riss
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: risss@informatik.tu-muenchen.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.tu-muenchen.de/~risss/index.html
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: djinnsr.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRAy 3 for Win95

TOOLS USED: 
    PSP 4.12 for heightfield creation and (c)-text. Apart
from that only my brain, paper, pencils (I ate most of them) and
some pages of an 'Anatomy for Artists' book.


RENDER TIME: 
    about 1h 30m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 60 with FPU bug

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The relief of being free at last shows clearly on it's face as the Djinn
rises out of the chaos of an other dimension. Summoned by a greater power
he let's out a cry to tell the world: 'Now my time has come!' 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

First I want to tell why I didn't include the Source in my posting:
The POV-Blob-human project is far from being finished and a lot of coding has
still to be done. Also the code isn't very readable. If I publish the code
it should look good and be easy to use (lots of predifined keyframes (they
are possible in POV) and comments. But I haven't yet reacherd this stage. So
you'll have to wait a little while for it. So for now keep visiting my homepage
for I will post the progress of my work there.

My first idea was to create a real Djinn out of a Lamp. But in the end time
grew short (in fact the scene was finished in one long night)
and I had to do something else.

The background is a really simple heightfield created with PSP in about 5 
Minutes or so. I painted some circles on a 500x500 Greyscale image then used 
several filters such as HotWaxCoating, Blur, ... then I smeared the color
 using the 'hand'-tool (gee, I forgot it's name).
In POV I applied a gradient colormap with fire colors and scaled it 
appropriately.
I was a little surprised of the effect it gave but I think it does not look
too bad and gives a good chaotic feeling.
One mistake I made is the red fog I laid over the whole scene. But I didn't 
have the time to rerender the image. The image really looks cool without it.
The scene is illuminated with three poinytlightsources of red and yellowish 
colors.
To give a feeling for the height of the magic smoke trail the Djinn leaves
behind I put in a mirroring disc beneath it. But it didn't work out that good
in the final trace.
The magic smoke is an attenuating halo contained in a single blob created by 
a loop. The suirface is covered with a gradient colormap from Flesh to Clear
to make the transition smooth.
Now the intresting thing: The Djinn.
I was working on a model for a human when I got the topic for the IRTC: Magic.
In fact the 'human' was only half complete it had arms but no hands, it had a
head but no legs. So what I saw in one of my 1000 testtraces was only a
incomplete upperbody of a human. With the word Magic in the back of my brain
the figure of a Djinn emerged from the depth of my thougts. (I like epic 
writing).

All I had to do was:
-Give the face some expression (this was not to easy because the head in 
general is made of one blob object with 50 handcoded elements. But I had one
day thought about making a short comment for each of the blob elements, so I
knew where I had to do some finetuning. And in the end I had a expression that
suited my needs. A laughing and chaotic looking face.
-Create the hands. Because I am mad (some people say so) I created the human 
body with animation in mind. So each joint is configurable and each limb
can be moved seperately (till now I have about 60 variables that only describe
the rotations of the seperate limbs). The effect is that it can 'easily' be 
animated using a keyframe-like technique and forward kinematics.
If you want to know more about my work visit my Homepage at
http://www.tu-muenchen.de/~risss/index.html
Each of the hands consists of 15 limbs, that makes 15 variables only for the 
rotations of the fingers. Still I'm not quite happy with the proportions but
it serves as a beginning.

Hoping that my English is not to bad and that some people read this.
If so, PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT IT.

Stefan


